The title of this blogpost is something I keep hearing about tons of flawed or objectively bad works that people enjoy and try to pitch it to others to do the same. Sometimes it’s a variant of that like ‘After you reach X, it picks up’, or ‘If you ignore the Y, it’s really good’.
Look, I get it. Not everything is perfect. Not everything has to be perfect. If it’s a game, controls can be loose, shooting mechanics can be obnoxious, characters can be inconsistent. If it’s a comic book or a book in general, the story or the art can be inconsistent or whatever.
What I don’t accept is when a large portion of the thing is of inferior quality and only has some points of brilliance that are ‘largely misunderstood’ because the rest of it is bad. Newsflash, you can have good ideas and bad execution.
What do you mean, ‘the book gets better after chapter 10’ when it has only 15 chapters???? Or that ‘once you reach the Institute, Fallout 4 opens up’???? That’s like a solid 20h of game you have to go through. Stop with this insanity.
Flawed things are flawed, and that’s okay
I love Mass Effect 1. I really do. But I don’t recommend it to anyone, even after Bioware did the remaster. It’s a really really flawed game that will test your patience. Once you play it and feel the themes it was going for, you’ll love it like I do. But make no mistake, I do not recommend it if you can’t get past its glacier-like intro. It’ll take you at least 3 to 4 hours to get through. The exposition made sense because Bioware had to tell the players that they were about to go through, but because of this, ME1 is heavy on the player that just wants the game to get on with it already and let them play it.
I’ll not say that ‘once the intro is over, you’ll like it’, because if you didn’t like the intro, you’ll stop playing it. Same with other deeply flawed games, like Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland or Need for Speed: ProStreet. Or Fallout 3, New Vegas or even 4. Neither of these games are terrible, just flawed, but trying to sell them to people as ‘hey, once you get to Downtown LA in THAW/ unlock Super Promotion in NFS ProStreet/ leave the Vault in FO3 / meet Benny in FNV / reach the Institute in FO4, the game gets better’ says that the person has to go through the mud of the flawed game to find its gem-like quality. And I do mean gem-like, because none of these are actual gems.
But that’s completely fine. As I said, good ideas and bad execution can happen, and usually it’s the norm.
Bad things are bad though
However I have to say it like it is: Bad things in works are bad and they should be called out as such. Not saying we should burn every copy of [insert slop book here] but we should at least document it enough for people to understand that’s nothow you should do things.
For every Super Mario Bros., there’s a Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde for the NES. But that doesn’t mean that both have to be treated the same way. For the former, we document and praise, for the latter, we document and use it as a cautionary tale of what not to copy.
Differently than others, I don’t want to position myself as someone that says “this sucks” all the time, because even the worst things can have somemerit. You can kind of see what they went for, but it wasn’t made well. It won’t stop them from being bad, of course, but sometimes, it kind of deserves a second try, in a better executed way.
Closing words
Next time you try to pitch something, if your sentence goes like the title, think hard if you are actually enjoying it yourself. Because that might be just you not wanting to admit it’s bad and you were just wasting your time. If it’s a flawed work, then absolutelydon’t pitch it like that, praise it’s finer points and warn the person that they’ll have an uphill battle but they’ll find it enjoyable nonetheless. After all, you wouldn’t be recommending something flawed if you didn’t like it either, right?